1897.] ESSAYS. 39 



flower stores aud found in one a woman sole proprietor and manager; 

 said she had more than her share of the trade ; she owned her green- 

 houses just outside the city limits. A large seed store in Springfield, 

 Ohio, is owned and managed by a Mrs. Haynes, who is doing a suc- 

 cessful business. Many women the past few years have engaged in 

 glass farming; greenhouses and hot-beds have many attractions. 

 The improved waj's of heating, ventilating and watering have reduced 

 labor as well as lightened it. 



The paying crops, just now, I think to raise are carnations, lettuce 

 and cucumbers. I love to see things grow and help them grow. I 

 love to work and never believed that work was a curse to any person. 

 The great curse is laziness and shiftlcssness. There is no better 

 place to see the work of women gardening than at our Agricultural 

 Fairs and Grange Harvest Festivals. It is often the case that the 

 women take more interest than the men, and largely the exhibits are 

 productions of the women. This was shown at the Middlesex South 

 Agricultural Fair last fall, when the Patrons of Framingham and 

 Sherborn Granges competed for the prizes, each table extending 

 across the hall. The women arranged the exhibits and I know they 

 had a hand in producing them ; fruit and vegetables as well as fancy 

 work. It was a good idea conceived by the Massachusetts Horti- 

 cultural Society of Boston in offering prizes to the scholars for school 

 gardens, school herbariums and children's herbariums. The cultiva- 

 tion and observation of plants in school grounds aud instruction upon 

 them being of high educational value. Native wild plants, such as 

 ferns, grasses, asters, golden-rods, violets, native shrubs; and eco- 

 nomic plants, such as grains, vegetable roots and leguminous plants ; 

 must be the stock of the gardens. Why is it that so many women of 

 taste, who love to adorn their persons with flowers and to decorate 

 their rooms with floral designs or collections of flowering plants, have 

 so little desire to enhance by the same means the beauty of the 

 external view which those rooms command and to add similar attrac- 

 tions to the outside of their dwellings ! It must be from the preva- 

 lent, yet mistaken idea, that gardening is too hard work for them. 

 For those who can claim brothers, husbands or fathers, who possess- 

 ing the taste and having the leisure for horticulture exemplify it, or 

 those who can afford to pay for the making and care of a garden, are 

 always quick to perceive its advantages and to enjoy them to the 

 utmost. But there are many household occupations which women 

 are expected to perform, and which they do perform without injury 

 or complaint, that are much more wearisome aud more difficult to 



